Full Description
The first-ever book to systematically and comprehensively investigate the unique sound worlds of the Global South, Sonic Perspectives from the Global Souths outlines the historical and aesthetic developments of sound practices in some of the key regions of South Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa.
It examines the sonic aesthesis and thinking in these regions in the light of a complex and fraught colonial relationship with the West to bring forward the under-engaged and often underrepresented artists and thinkers and sonic epistemologies from the Global South. The book is auto-ethnographic in approach, informed by the author's own practice and migratory background, and draws insights from long conversations with prominent sound practitioners based in the Global South or part of their diaspora. The book traces a decolonial milieu of sounding and listening and offers embodied perspectives on the unheard reciprocity, resonant relationality, and the aural confluences.
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction: Throwing a Stone into the Pond
1.1 Listening Beyond Borders and Cultures
1.2 Sound Studies and the Global Souths
1.3 A Counter-canon
1.4 Connecting Resonances
2. Resounding Plurilogues
2.1 South Asia
2.2 Middle East
2.3 Africa
2.4 Latin America
3. Nomadic Listening: A Sonic Auto-ethnography
4. Audible Disjunctures and Epistemological Shifts
4.1 Non-linear Temporalities in Listening Cultures
4.2 Outdoor Sounds and Non-perspectival Sonic Space
4.3 Resonating Inter-subjectivity and Hyper-listening
4.4 Acoustic Innovations and Precolonial Technologies
4.5 Orality
4.6 Ephemerality of Sound and Unrecording
4.7 Adaptive Perception and Vibrant Urban Ambience
4.8 Post-digital Convergence and Unarchiving
4.9 Co-listening and Acoustic Commoning
5. Ears to the Ground
5.1 Situated Concepts, Extra-sonic Ideas and Thoughts
5.2 Ritual and Ceremonial Sounds, and Tuning Systems
5.3 Everyday Listenings
5.4 Religious Sonorities
5.5 Acoustic Communion and Gatherings
5.6 Sound-producing Instruments
5.7 Voicings
6. Global Sonic Interactions and Unheard Reciprocities
6.1 Gamelan, Sufi Music and Claude Debussy
6.2 Dhvani, Rasa, and John Cage
6.3 Tanpura Drone, American Minimalism and Ambient Music
6.4 Migrations of Pluri-rhythms
6.5 Transnational Synthesizing and Disco Time
6.6 Technologies of Capture, Cinema, and Oral Traditions of Storytelling
6.7 World Wide Web, Internet of Sounds and Sounding Arts
7. An Equal Sound
7.1 Sonic Global Souths: A Re-listening
7.2 Anti-/De-colonial Listening
7.3 Diversifying and Pluralizing the Canon, Dismantling Eurocentrism
7.4 Epistemicide, and Sonic Aesthesis
7.5 Resonant Relationality
7.6 Aural Confluence
7.7 Sonic Futurisms
7.8 An Equal Sound: Epilogue
7.9 A Silent Encore
Notes
References
Index
